NICK BUSHMAN LUNGED TO PROTECT HIS LITTLE BROTHER. The old nutter had shown up in his kitchen spewing about dreams and different worlds—lunatic-grade material. That was all surprising and awkward, but didn’t seem particularly worrisome, until the maniac drew a sword.
“Look, mate,” Nick said, pushing Oliver backward toward the den, “I don’t know what you want, but I’ve got some money and some electronics you could sell for a fair bit. We don’t want any violence here.”
“No,” Master Gabriel replied, “and that is part of the problem. You are seeing what you want to see because you do not want the violent truth. And because of that, I have no choice. I must open your eyes no matter the pain it causes.”
The intruder took up his broadsword, and Nick swallowed. This was no costume weapon. This was cold, wickedly sharp metal. Nick’s mind flew into calculations. Before he knew what he was thinking, he’d already sized up the intruder and calculated the best angle of attack.
His kitchen was narrow, so the maniac had a very limited space for any sort of slash or swing. That left a thrust. Nick felt certain he could sidestep the impaling attack, roll toward the cabinets, and take the man down with a ’rang to the throat.
Nick blinked. He’d seen the whole thing in his mind, and it would work—he was sure of it. But here was the baffling thing: he had no combat training. How would he know the first thing about this sort of hand-to-hand fighting?
“Again,” Master Gabriel said, “I am sorry. This will be quite . . . disturbing to you.”
“Oliver!” Nick grunted, lowering to a crouch and readying his countermove. “Get outside. Get on your bike, ride to Dunny’s place. Ring the police.”
“No, Nicky,” Oliver protested, “I can’t leave ya!”
Nick used his body as a shield. He kept his eyes riveted to the intruder, but continued to nudge Oliver back. “No time for heroics, Ollie. Get yourself to Dunny’s like I said. Go!”
“This is for the best,” Master Gabriel said, raising the sword high.
“Go!” Nick commanded, and to his relief he heard Oliver pound across the den floor and crash through the screen door. But the maniac wasn’t going for a thrust after all. He’d expertly maneuvered the blade vertically and held it now like a major league slugger.
Nick instantly changed tactics. He’d bull-rush, duck under the chopping stroke, and take the bloke down to the kitchen floor. From there he’d give the bitzer a bit of knuckle to chew on.
But Gabriel moved the sword faster than Nick thought possible. With strength and fury, the intruder carved a wicked gash across . . . the cabinets.
Nick dodged, and he banged into the pantry. A bag of flour fell off a shelf, hit the floor hard, sending up a white cloud at Nick’s feet.
“Dooley!” Nick cried out. “What’re ya doing?”
Master Gabriel paid Nick no mind but thrust the sword into a walnut-colored cabinet, plunging the blade in almost to the hilt. He jagged to the left, carving a carpenter-straight line across the rest of the cabinet and then through the metal of the stove’s overhead microwave oven.
Nick stood up straight and stared. “How crazy are ya?”
Master Gabriel sheathed his sword. Turning to the furrow he’d just carved, he took hold of an edge and began to pull it away from the wall. But it wasn’t the actual cabinetry pulling away from the kitchen wall.
“That’s not possible,” Nick said, gasping for words. “This isn’t real.”
“Quite the contrary,” Master Gabriel said, continuing to peel away. “What you will see behind this facade is reality. See for yourself.”
With a great, wrenching pull, Master Gabriel yanked the cabinets, the counter, the microwave, and the stove—at least, a two-dimensional print of them—and tore them down to the kitchen floor.
Behind it was quite a different sight. The cabinets were still there, but only a blackened skeleton of them. The wall behind them had been partially ripped out, exposing the studs and in some spots allowing the outside to be seen.
Nick gawked, his mind registering the scene and wrestling with its meaning. He stared through the jagged porthole and saw Queensland. While it was broad daylight in the kitchen, the view through the destruction showed night. There were fires, patches of angry flame that didn’t belong in his beloved countryside, and there was something else, something wrong on the distant Glass House Mountains.
Nick craned his neck to view the vista from multiple angles. He counted. “Blast it,” he muttered. “There have always been eleven. Now, there are just eight. How do three mountains just disappear?”
Master Gabriel sighed. “Do you understand now?” he asked. “Do you remember?”
“Remember?” Nick scoffed. “Only thing I remember is that there used to be eleven mountains. That’s what I . . . I . . . I’m a Dreamtreader, aren’t I?”
Master Gabriel unloaded a large sigh of relief. “Thank the Almighty,” he whispered. “I was afraid we’d lost you. Yes, Nick Bushman, you are a Dreamtreader.”
“And Archer . . . Archer Keaton, he woke me up the first time, right?”
“That’s right.”
“But we failed,” Nick said, closing his eyes. “That’s what all this is. We failed, the Rift finally happened, and the world’s gone spewing mad.”
“You had a great deal of help. You had powerful enemies who wanted the Rift to happen.”
Nick muttered, “Kara.”
“And others,” Master Gabriel confirmed. “Archer suspects you have Kara to thank for this lovely fantasy you’ve been living in.”
“Kara?” Nick barked. “Wouldn’t surprise me. Spewing mad, she is.”
“By the way,” Master Gabriel said, “were you really going to eat that?” He gestured.
Nick looked and found the stove was now misshapen, dented, and corroded with some crust that looked like battery acid. And then he saw the roast beef sandwich he had just made for himself. In the peeled skin of fantasy, the sandwich still looked delicious: medium-lean roast beef, Muenster cheese slices not melted but drooping deliciously, crisp lettuce still wet from washing, and those ripe heirloom tomatoes—mouthwatering in total.
But when Nick took a step forward and looked past the failing fantasy to the reality, he retched and nearly lost the contents of his stomach.
“Dooley! What . . . is that?”
With a nostril-flaring sneer, Master Gabriel said, “Filet of rat, I believe.”
“All right, then,” Nick said, steadying himself. “I’m officially gobsmacked. Remind me to thank Kara for this little bit of madness. So how do we fix this, Master Gabriel? How do we end the Rift and turn the world back?”
Master Gabriel did not answer.
“We can fix this, can’t we?”
“The Rift might be repaired,” Master Gabriel said slowly. “How that might be accomplished will be your task. But the Waking World, as you knew it, may never be the same again.”
“I don’t like the sound of that,” Nick said. “No better time to start than now, I guess. Where’s Archer?”
Master Gabriel paused once more. “I have more bad news, actually . . .”